


Recollection

by SilviaKundera



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-06
Updated: 2003-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilviaKundera/pseuds/SilviaKundera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every monster at twelve becomes the boogeyman at thirty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recollection

**Author's Note:**

> Written for "Magic Mistletoe" 2002, with canon through Book 4.

_What would you give for your kid fears_  
\- indigo girls

 

He was twelve, and every monster at twelve becomes the boogeyman at thirty.

There are stacks of them --

Picture it: formless gray lumps of shadow, one on top of the other, filed in a great closet. The closet would have such a door! Wide, knotted oak, with a lock hanging off it.

\-- and they go where that special kind of dark went; the kind that felt thicker, and denser, and more scary than anything.

They can't touch a man who's thirty, with his rain resistant overcoat and the life he left behind.

*

He works in an office and he has his own cubicle.

The walls are flimsy, and they're cut off right above his eye line (and he was never a tall man), but they stand despite the artificial breeze blowing out crisply (with an oddly plastic smell near closing) from the vents behind his head, and the heavy press and release of foot traffic between the side office and his copier.

The copier is his because he's the one who keeps fixing it, and he brings in new paper. The ones who know this ask for a hand when it jams, and the ones who don't, well, sometimes they don't get their copies made, do they?

As a new leaf, turned long enough ago that many things are blurred, it's not half bad.

*

He uses magic; he's not repressed or anything. And he's not defensive either, except when Hermione owls, because there's this _tone_ to them.

He's found that the wand works best as a sort of universal remote. Like point and click, without the click sound that usually isn't there anyway, as long as you didn't buy the damned machine in the early nineties. And it wasn't like he'd been around for much of those.

Point and turn the television on, or the lights if he's nowhere near the switch, or swing the icebox closed if he'd forgotten it. Simple.

He works his hours to buy smaller things to transfigure into bigger things, or visa versa, when the tiny things are more expensive. He would worry that it's cheating, except he's killed a few people, here and there, and so he supposes it wouldn't matter much in the long run.

*

It's not some washed out, gray and pastel documentary on the History Channel. He had a cause, and it was a government's cause - the _right_ government's cause - and that makes him not a serial killer. He's looked into it.

*

They call it The Children's War -- Hermione told him, once, and he said, "I thought we weren't going to talk about that."

It's funny, how _Hogwarts, A History_ keeps updating. Someday he thinks she'll have to build a second house for it, or maybe a barn. The book will have its own room soon, as it is.

It's the strangest image in his head; he pictures her turning the bed down for it. A truly gigantic one, with four legs shooting up to hold a canopy. He thinks back on this at the oddest times, like while the coffee brews or a new memo is all faded and he has to hold it up to the light. It makes him laugh, and he loves her terribly for it.

*

He doesn't love her _so much_ , or he would visit, she says.

*

He left with no suitcases (a childish, foolhardy touch) and blinked out of notice, and no one noted it at first, he's heard, because nothing much had happened. There had been no funerals and he'd killed He Who Kept Popping Right Out Again, Though He Was Dead, Like Some Damned Toddler's Plaything, finally, a couple years back.

He simply grew tired. That's it.

He had been tired, and he is still tired, but at least it's the kind of tired you do by yourself.

*

When Harry spies the wisp under his bed, he isn't surprised for an instant, because, frankly, that is exactly where a boogeyman should be. It makes such utter sense that he almost returns to sleep.

And then he remembers that those sorts of things don't happen anymore.

"You're a dream," he says, and doesn't believe it, not entirely.

"I expected more from Harry _Potter_ ," he receives in return, the 'p' a gnashing between the specter's teeth.

He is thirty, and his back aches. "Yes, doesn't everyone."

*

He does not expect an empty house in the morning, and is not disappointed. He's not particularly anything.

He's not scared, that's for sure.

He makes his tea, butters his toast, and turns on the tele to discover that his scar still tells the weather tolerably well. It will not rain. He flicks towards his briefcase and the appropriate folders stuff themselves in. He draws the curtains with his hands, out of habit.

"I have nothing to say to you," he reminds the ghost, for it couldn't have forgotten.

Tom Riddle is not yet a man, and it shows in his face. "I wouldn't go so far as _that_."

"No, perhaps you wouldn't," Harry agrees, nodding and turning the morning paper to its second page.

*

And yet, here's what he had not remembered about Tom Riddle:

The boy is in love with him.

It's sick, and more than a little sad, and he's too old for this.

*

It's like that muggle idea, Ron told him once, about people and their kidnappers -- when they're all bottled up. And Harry said, "Where did you hear _that_ from?" and it turned out that Ron had read it in a book, so Harry teased and pinched at his shoulder.

Harry can remember Ron's face, a little, and they were sixteen and blushing so hard. They were glad he was gone, long gone, so they wouldn't have to think about him. It.

It must be a terrible, terrific thing, to have your past as your future, looming over the horizon.

And how could a man not _fall_ for it, want to _become_ it, just so it would arrive?

*

His car sputters along all seventeen lines of shops that lie between him and the office, and it sputters back like clockwork, and he knows Tom will be waiting, because Tom waited then, between finely grained pages, before he even knew who he was waiting for.

Harry knew at twelve, and he knows now, with blood particles under his fingernails that he can't see but a microscope could find, if he had one.

"Will you leave then?" he asks, because you flush the boogeymen out this way, with covers and hands and light.

*

It shouldn't work, with Tom the ghost of a ghost, maybe, but he kisses Harry and Harry feels it -- like ice in his stomach. His hands fold over Harry's hips, press them both against the wall (the one with that picture Ginny painted for him and fished out of the rubble, slightly torn at one end), and fold up inside of Harry's chest, over his lungs. It's like he pets them, and Harry breathes like he's twenty, and it would be _glorious_ if it were anyone else. It almost is anyhow, and Harry shivers at the thick pelt of dark hair brushing his forehead.

It shouldn't work (nothing, really, not even a monster), but Harry takes Tom Riddle's tongue into his mouth and feels something like a stab of blunt heat into his stomach.

He feels like he's falling, and then he is, and then he is on his back and staring at a fading shadow, rustling from the rushing air from the bedroom's open window.

*

"You killed my parents," Harry spits out, like a reflex, and feels a bit like Inigo Montoya. But it _hurts_ , like always, and he would not take the words back, despite the humor in them.

"Actually," Tom says, so very conversational, even when fading fast -- a flicker, "I didn't kill _anybody_."

"You will," Harry attests, and doesn't blink to watch it, the sun breaking through Tom's back.

And the boy says, still so haughty, "I would think **I** am to decide that, actually."

"No." He knows this. "Because you did. It's _done_."

"You have your tenses all mixed up, " Tom observes.


End file.
